I cannot accommodate you in a dream woven from the rags of my paradise lost. Ruins that I did not have the strength to enter when I was passing by years ago. Mine is in ruins now, it was in one of the sanatoriums that existed in the Kamo region, where my grandmother and grandfather were teachers. But, although Tumanyan talked about “the best home in all cases…” you come to realize that sometimes it does not exist.
Is it worth turning the chicken into the egg, the tree into the seed, or the person into the story of his childhood home? That sweet home that many of us consumed because we were Hansel and Gretel, because childhood homes are always delicious, they always beckon to us in an opening as we roam hungrily through a thick forest, even if we grew up with nights cramped up in a narrow space in a slum.Įveryone has one of them – a trilingual primary space, a pre-world, a shelter or nook near the sky, a cellar that housed our oldest fears, a corner of refuge and solitude. My first home is deleted before my very eyes and remains indelible. It isn’t coming together – the gaps are too wide, you can’t lock yourself in here. To give it a lived-in feeling, I fill it with all kinds of tastes and smells – I hang pieces of dried apple on a string here and there, I put onions in the fireplace to roast (how I hated them), and if my nose could take in the grandma-grandpa smell that had seeped into the walls, I would have remembered it for sure but, alas, it has not been around anywhere for such a long, long time. There’s that old radio that kept hissing endlessly, the fluttering curtain, the pattern on the blanket-or was it the tablecloth? I can’t remember-my hidey-hole, the cracks in the corner that turned into evil monsters, I even place the teacup holders in the chipped cupboard. I fill the inside of the place with memories of my childhood home. It wasn’t a castle in the sky like Miyazaki’s whimsical Laputa, but more like something from Ararat Minasyan’s “Philosophy of everyday life” series, where an uprooted high-rise building or house has been placed in a plastic bag. Well? Step inside, lock the door, stay home, save lives.īut you did not want to lock yourself in my house in the air. The address is unknown, but it is a modern place. Okay, here’s a bright sun, a blue sky, trees and flowers all around, a couple of people wearing the latest fashion in the Spring-Summer 2020 season – face masks and gloves (do you want a backdrop of Mount Ararat, a couple of plane trees, and a stork as well? No? As you wish). Hmm, perhaps it was too cut off from the rest of the world. Who wouldn’t want to live in one of those houses that kids draw? You didn’t want to. A rectangle with a triangle on top, and everything is in place – four walls and a roof, a door and windows, a chimney perhaps, but not necessarily. Here’s a simple option – like those houses that kids draw.
So when the calls to “come home” grew pointless, and when the world locked down with calls of “stay home”, when that wolf of a virus knocked in turn on the doors of the pig that made a house of straw, the one that made a house of sticks, and the one that made a house of bricks, and it seemed like the unsafe outdoors had once again lost the battle to the home fortress, when our noble tribe of street protesters caught up with the rest of humanity and tried to simmer in our own hearths, I decided to finally bring you home, or rather, keep you home. Although you can also find Armenians that are hearthless. Armenians don’t have homes, they have hearths. We live in a burning home, equating it with our hearth.
You live in ashes, in the lantern of life. You are one of a hundred million homeless people, I’m one of ten million Armenians spread around the world. We both have an issue with what they call “home”. We’re not from the same home, but we’re in the same boat. Even vagabonds are eventually homebound, but you are homeless. Stay home, they tell you, but you have no home.
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